This short book by Richard Russo is a collection of essays on both writing and life events he has experienced. He offers a smidgeon of advice as well, most of it ill advised. The book is not a memoir, but just some rambling writing by Russo. It is a quick read at just over 200 pages.

The essays often wander off track, never returning to the original point presented initially in the essay. Some are more of a stream of consciousness rambling. He often goes on a rant against ebooks, Amazon, and chain booksellers such as Barnes and Noble and Borders (back in the day when they existed).

His life advice is terrible, to put it mildly. He believes having a good job, making good money (as he does), making your parents proud, or discovering your aptitude in life (as he has done) are terrible things to achieve. He also suggests people should have many children, even if they cannot afford to properly feed and clothe them, or if they possess poor parenting skills. That is exactly what we need, child abusers having children and people having children who are neither financially capable nor emotionally equipped to care for them. What is wrong with this guy?

I am sorry I wasted the few hours it took to read this book. My time could have been better spent reading a decent book. ( )

Richard Russo, among my favorite authors, proves to be no less entertaining in his essays than in his novels. His “The Destiny Thief” (2018) should interest other hardcore Russo fans, as well as anyone else intrigued by how writers write.

In the title essay, Russo recalls being in a fiction workshop at the University of Arizona as a young man. His instructor told him he would never make it as a novelist and should stick with a career in teaching. A classmate, meanwhile, was hailed as a future star in the literary world. Instead that classmate never rose out of obscurity, while Russo won a Pulitzer for Empire Falls. He, probably like the other man, feels as if he somehow stole the other's destiny.

Russo's way of mixing the comic with the serious helps explain why his novels are so endearing to many, and he explains his attitude toward humor in "The Gravestone and the Commode." At one time, he writes, he had one of each in his backyard. "The best humor has always resided in the chamber next to the one occupied by suffering," he writes. "There's a door adjoining these rooms that's never completely closed."

Two essays focus on other writers. In one he writes about the difficulty of separating Mark Twain's fiction from his nonfiction because Twain put so much truth in his stories and so much invention in his supposedly true accounts. In another he describes “The Pickwick Papers” by Charles Dickens as "a jailbreak of the writer's imagination." It was during the writing of this book that Dickens let himself go to become the kind of writer he was destined to be.

Russo discusses in several of these essays the influence of his usually absent father on his life and on his fiction. His father was the model for perhaps his best-loved character, Sully in “Nobody's Fool” and “Everybody's Fool,” as well as for other characters in other books.

Good writing has at least as much to do with hard work over a long period of time as natural talent, the author tells us. His father was a union man. Union members pay their dues. ( )

Perfectly fine collection of essays. I would neither recommend them nor discourage you from reading them. ( )

Essays on writing from a modern master of storytelling. ( )

Wonderful glimpse into this Pulitzer prize winning authors mind and process. ( )